When working on the book about my mother I often stared at an image of Marlene Dumas’s painting of the recently dead Marilyn Monroe, painted from a photograph from her autopsy. Autopsy comes from the Greek: to see with one’s own eyes.

Particles, if small and plentiful enough, take on the appearance of a whole. This is true for drizzle, which from afar resembles continuous sheets of fog. It’s true for your own body, made up of cells and atoms.

Time stopped. The flight from Beijing is one hour long. That’s what the itinerary and the ticket said. And that’s what mattered because as much as my iPhone told me three hours had passed, time in North Korea is not ruled by Greenwich.

There will be more imposters, whether confidence men or redundancies. It is inevitable that some of them will be machines, either by accident or by design. Machines will soon think and some of them will make things that could be art.